Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine Nov 2018

FROM THE SOURCE
KATHERINE ZIESING | CANBERRA
Two years on from the move that saw Leidos Australia, ADM Managing Editor Katherine Ziesing spoke with Chief Executive Christine Zeitz about where the business has come from and where it’s headed as it continues its transformation into a true systems integration business.
Christine Zeitz
Leidos Australia Chief Executive
Board Member, South Australian Economic Advisory Council
Board Member, Centre for Defence Industry Capability
ADM: It’s been about two years since the Lockheed Martin IS&GS/Leidos merg- er; how has that bedded down? What’s the last two years been like?
ZEITZ: Hectic. We’ve had the most amaz- ing experience and I think, privilege, of setting up a new company with a very large base that supports Defence and Govern-
and project management. All this whilst significantly growing the new company through winning and mobilising new pro- grams and completing a critical transforma- tion program in Defence under Centralised Processing (CP) and continuing to service all our existing customers.
So, yes, it’s been very hectic but immense- ly rewarding for the whole team. We have now defined our culture as Leidos. We have a strong Australian executive team and ex- ceptional staff.
ADM: Can you give us an update on your large defence programs such as CP (Cen- tralised Processing) with CIOG? What does that cover? Where were you and where are you now?
ZEITZ: The CP contract has three phas- es: the first phase in which Defence out- sourced the support of the existing en- vironment to us had commenced before the merger. The second phase was the transformation program which was trans- forming their extant legacy environment, refreshing it onto a new environment with standard patterns and that was halfway through when we merged.
It had got into a little bit of trouble dur- ing the merger period and it had gone a bit red, which was not where we wanted to be as Leidos. But happily as of December last year we met FOC and the ANAO audit on the final milestone was green. To get an ANAO green audit is quite outstanding for the whole team and was the result of a very strong partnership with CIOG.
FOC last December gave CIOG and there- fore Defence an infrastructure platform that is refreshed, contemporary and in pattern. The idea being that you can then lower your cost of support and provide greater agility for the introduction of future requirements.
We’re now in phase three – the support phase. We are now able to work with De- fence around contemporary solutions such as hybrid clouds. There’s a lot of discussion around public-private clouds, Microsoft Azure and AWS and we’re talking about that in our future planning with CIOG. So that’s CP, where we have consolidated 280 data centres into 12 domestic and three in- ternational modern data centres.
ADM: And obviously you’ve got a pres- ence in the intelligence community as well on that ICT front?
ZEITZ: Well, no, I wouldn’t call it just on
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CHRISTINE ZEITZ
PROFILE
Chief Executive, Australia ment in so many ways. So it’s like a start-up
& Asia Pacific, Leidos
Board Member, The Institute for Regional Security
Vice President & Managing Director, Australia & Asia Pacific, Lockheed Martin
President, North East Asia, BAE Systems
Council Member, Flinders University
with a heritage of 20 years.
On day one we inherited about 750 ex-
ceptional people and we’ve now grown to 1,200, over 40 per cent growth in our first two years. We’ve moved from a very pre- dominantly platform centric brand to a new Leidos brand focussed on systems integra- tion through technology and engineering. As the original Leidos brand was less well known in Australia, it has been exciting to deliver the new brand and culture for Lei-
Director, Defence Logistics, dos Australia operations.
BAE Systems
Director, Strategy & Business
I think it’s important for people to under- stand that the merger in the US was 50 per Development, BAE Systems cent Leidos and 50 per cent IS&GS. When the whole company moved to Leidos busi- ness systems this change impacted only 50 per cent of staff in the US. In Australia, the change of business systems impacted all of our staff (including the heritage Leidos staff based in Australia). So really a total change. We’ve now successfully changed or trans- formed all of our business systems and pro- cesses; finance, supply, timesheets, payroll
58 | November 2018 | www.australiandefence.com.au